Dungeons & Dragons Tales from The Yawning Portal

I'm the family dungeon master. We aren't the most experienced group, but we've gone through Lost Mines of Phandelver, Dragon of IceSpire Peak, Curse of Strahd, and we're on the second adventure in Tales of the Yawning Portal. We're running the adventures consecutively as a campaign, and, so far, this has been our favorite book. My wife says the pacing feels like a book of short stories vs Curse of Strahd being more like a novel. The dungeons are challenging, have unique mechanics, great roleplay opportunities, and are just really fun.I've incorporated downtime activities in between modules. So when a session ends with a finished module, the next session starts with the characters each having had 30 days of downtime where they can decide how they spent their gold to improve their characters in various ways. This makes acquiring monetary treasure a lot more exciting than it was in Curse of Strahd where there was little opportunity to spend money. Then it's pretty easy to insert a new adventure hook where the characters get back together as a party to go tackle a new challengeI loved roleplaying Meepo the kobold in The Sunless Citadel, and the encounter with the white dragon wyrmling was memorable. The magic whistle that summons an undead is also a really cool magic item that the party is putting to good use, and they're carefully keeping track of when it recharges. In forge of fury, I had a blast controlling the duergar who can turn invisible and enlarge themselves. The succubus is great too. So far, the party is very suspicious of the damsel in distress oddly holed up in the middle of the dungeon, and they've resisted her attempt at charming one of them. They haven't quite figured out exactly what she is, though, and she told them some lies that they bought ;) We usually play once a week, but, after last session 2 days ago, everyone was excited to play again, and we're playing again this evening.I don't know why everyone says Curse of Strahd is by far the best 5e adventure. While it was definitely great, we are enjoying Tales of the Yawning Portal much more.

I was brand new to D&D in 4e when my friend ran his own campaign. When 5e came out, a different group of friends wanted to play D&D, but I was the only one with any prior experience, so I became the DM. We've been going through the 5e starter set, and as they are finishing that up, I'm looking for the next step for their characters. The standard published campaigns are somewhat problematic in that they all start at level 1. If your players want to keep playing the same characters (up to level 20, or whenever they die), its going to take a bit of work on your part.Enter Tales From the Yawning Portal. I have not personally run my players through any of the adventures yet, but I have read through each one pretty extensively. The way they are set up is brilliant, and even as a new DM it seems that they will be very easy to run. Tyranny of Dragons has a good story from what I've read through, but it doesn't seem to be set up in a way that is easy to DM, with a lot of fill work required on your part.Tales is a little different however from the other full campaigns in that they are meant to be sprinkled in bigger campaigns/adventures, not necessarily stand on their own as one over-arching campaign. That being said, you can do that, as the levels of the adventures compliment each other; the first one is 1-3, the second 3-5, then 5-8, etc. There won't be any over-arching story, but that doesn't matter too much. My personal plan is to run Horde of the Dragon Queen next (I will have to modify it as my characters are level 4) and when they are done with that, I will run them through one of the Tales adventures before moving onto part two of Tyranny, Rise of Tiamat. I had already bought those books, and their characters tie in nicely with the story. For the most part though, I can't wait to get to the Tales adventures. After the full campaign is done, I might run them through Tomb of Horrors, the last adventure in Tales. I am doing that last, because of the looks of it, it will kill them.The last thing I wanted to mention about Tales from the Yawning Portal is that the adventures feel very much like they were taken from past editions, but that's not a bad thing. I have several AD&D books that I've skimmed through, and the adventures seem very similar in terms of traps, puzzles and choices the characters can make. Also, most of the adventures seem, at least to me, that they are deadlier than the current 5e lineup. Many sections require smart thinking on the part of the players, not something that is easy to hack and slash their way through with min-maxed characters. The last adventure, Tomb of Horrors, looks especially devious. It was originally created by Gary Gygax himself, as a way to humble even his strongest players. These adventures are tough, but look to be extremely rewarding for those who survive.All in all, this is a solid, easy to use product that adds much needed content beyond first starting level. I highly recommend it.

If you want classic-style dungeon crawls and nothing BUT dungeon crawls, you've come to the right place. Tales from the Yawning Portal is wall-to-wall dungeons crawls.This takes a bunch of beloved dungeon modules from past editions of the game, from The Sunless Citadel to the Tomb of Horrors, converts them to 5th edition, and packs them in between two covers. The level ranges were chosen so that in theory, you could play these in order as a dungeon-focused campaign. It would take characters from 1st level to the upper levels without missing a beat.No need to do that, though, and there is no narrative thread holding them together.It's just a big book o' dungeons.And that's awesome. This is basically seven full modules in one book, so it's a good value for that alone. They chose some good ones, too. Forge of Fury is a fantastic 3rd edition dungeon, for example, that is challenging and which is also easy to pull apart and adapt, since each of its five levels can server as a standalone dungeon.The conversions are good. One down side: Maps are a touch on the small side, it's not always easy to read distances with the tiny, tiny hexes.Otherwise, I don't have much criticism. I've already run two of these (or parts of two of them), and expect to run a few more. I've already gotten two months of play out of this book. No complaints!

My favorite DnD book! Good anthology. Easy to run for the DM. The Sunless Citadel is a must for any new player introduced to DnD. Highly recommend!

A bunch of one-shots that I can insert into my world. A good change of pace for the squad.